Страница 29 из 62
Nicole looked around the room. "So you like asked if he'd kill Shelly? I don't know. But 1 can tell you he likes to hurt people."
Rune picked up a thin chain with sharp alligator clips on each end. The clips were crusted with blood. She set them down.
Nicole shut off the lights, and they walked down the corridor to the stairs.
Which is when Rune heard the noise.
She whispered, "There, what was that?"
Nicole paused on the second step. "What?"
"I heard something, back there. Are there other rooms like that?"
"A couple of them. In the back. But they were dark, remember? We didn't see any lights."
They waited a moment.
"Nothing." Nicole was halfway up the stairs before Rune put her foot on the lower step. Then she heard it again, the noise.
No, she decided, it was actually two noises. One was similar to what she'd heard before: the ominous swishing of the hickory stick as it swung down on the leather bench.
The second was maybe just the sound of air escaping from a pipe or steam or distant traffic.
Or maybe it was what Rune thought it sounded like- the sound of a man's restrained laugh.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The watering can leaked but aside from that, Rune decided, it was a pretty good idea.
She rang the bell at Da
Bimbos from the Amazon… Lord help us.
Rune walked past her. The woman blinked and stepped aside.
"Sorry we couldn't make it yesterday. Had a load ol rhododendraniums to deliver to an office in Midtown, one of Trump's buildings, and the whole crew was busy."
"You mean rhododendrons?"
Rune nodded. "Yeah."
She'd have to be careful. A bimbo with some intelligence.
"Careful," the woman said. "Your can leaks. You don't want to, you know, hurt the wood."
"Got it." Rune started to work, watering Traub's plants and trimming the leaves with a pair of scissors. She carefully stuffed them into her pocket. The green jacket she wore had saidmobil on it when she'd bought the thing at a secondhand store. But she'd cut the logo off and replaced it with a U.S. Department of Forestry patch.
She'd called Lame Duck and the studio receptionist had reported that Traub would be on the set for a couple of hours and couldn't be disturbed. Her only concern had been ru
Well, it was a risk coming here. But what in life isn't?
Traub's only guest, however, appeared to be this brunette basketball player.
The woman didn't seem too suspicious; she was moreinterested in what Rune was doing. Watching everything she did, which-as far as Rune knew-was to murder every plant she touched. She didn't know zip about gardening.
"Did it take you a long time to learn all that stuff? About plants?" the Amazon asked.
"Not too long."
"Oh," she said and watched Rune cut through the roots of an African violet.
Rune said, "You want to give themsome water but not too much. Andsome light. But-"
"Not too much of that either."
"Right."
The woman nodded and recorded that fact somewhere beneath her shiny, he
"Never cut too many leaves off. And always make sure you use the proper type of scissors. That is extremely important. Sharp ones."
A nod; the woman's mental computer disk whirred.
"You make a living doing that?"
Rune said, "You'd be surprised."
"Is it hard to learn?"
"You need some talent but if you work hard…"
"I'm an actress," Amazon said, then did a line of cocaine and sat down in front of the TV to watch a soap opera.
Ten minutes later Rune had defoliated half of Traub's plants and had worked her way upstairs into his office.
It was empty. She looked up and down the corridor and saw nobody. She stepped inside and swung the door shut. There was no file cabinet inside but Traub did have a big desk and it wasn't locked.
Inside she found bills, catalogs from glitzy gadget companies, a dildo missing its batteries, dozens of German S amp; M photo magazines, roach clips and parts of water pipes, matchbooks, pens, casino chips. Nothing that could help her-
"Want another martini?" the voice asked, coldly.
Rune froze, then turned slowly. The blonde, the same woman who had served her and Traub the other day-the one she'd been hoping she didn't run into-stood in the doorway.
Well, it was a risk coming here…
The woman walked sullenly past her and pulled open another drawer. It held maybe a thousand in crumpled tens and twenties. "Help yourself." She turned and walked out of the office.
Rune closed the drawer. "Wait, can I talk to you?"
The blonde kept walking. When Rune caught up to her in the corridor she said, "I'm Crystal. You're…?"
"Rune."
"You want to get into films or just robbing my boyfriend?"
"Is he really your boyfriend?"
She didn't answer.
Crystal led the way to the roof. Outside, she took off her bathrobe and bikini top and stretched out on a lawn recliner covered with thick pink towels. She rubbed aloe vera sunscreen on her chest and arms and legs and lay back, closing her eyes.
Rune looked around. "Nifty place."
Crystal shrugged, wondering, it seemed, what was nifty about a gray sundeck. She said, "He's not." She pulled on sunglasses with dark blue lenses. Looked at Rune. "My boyfriend, I mean." She didn't speak for a moment, then she said, "Every once in a while you see these big cruise ships come down the river. I wonder where they're going sometimes. Have you ever been on a cruise?"
Rune said, "I took this neat cruise around the city once. The Circle Line. I pretended I was a Viking."
"A Viking. With the helmets?"
"Right."
"I mean a real cruise."
"No."
"I never have either. I'd like to go sometime."
Rune said, "You have a wonderful figure."
"Thank you," she said as if no one had ever told her. "You want some blow?"
"No thanks."
Crystal 's head lolled toward the sun. Her arms draped over the edges of the recliner. Even her breathing was lethargic. "I'd like to live in the Caribbean, I think. I was in St. Bart's once. And I've been to Club Med a couple times, Paradise Island. I met a guy, only he was married and was separated and after we got back to New York he went back to his wife. Fu
"I know I don't."
"I could do exotic dancing-I don't have to make films. But the thing is, with the dancing… You stand in a little room and guys look at you and, well, you know what they're doing. It's not really disgusting, it's more… what's the word?…" She searched for a while but couldn't find it. She gave up. Put on more lotion. "What were you looking for upstairs?"
"Did you know Shelly Lowe?"
The head turned but where the eyes might be looking under the gunmetal-blue reflections Rune couldn't tell. She saw only two identical, fish-eye images of herself. Crystal said, "I met her once or twice. I never worked with her."
"Did she and Da
Crystal eased onto her stomach. "Not too bad, not too good. He's a, you know, asshole. Nobody gets along with Da
"Just between you and me?"
"Sure" was the response, so lazy that Rune believed her.
"I'm doing a film about Shelly Lowe. She was a real actress, you know."
"We're all real actresses," Crystal said quickly as if she'd been conditioned to respond this way. But she didn't sound defensive or angry.